2018/04/01 by Douglas Dodds · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Digitization #Word (group theory) #Image (mathematics) #Computer science #Computer graphics (images) #Multimedia #Linguistics #Artificial intelligence #Computer vision #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.1093/jvcult/vcy020
openalex publication_date 2018/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
In a recent issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture, Zoe Alker and Christopher Donaldson drew attention to ‘the dubious habit of treating digital collections as objectively constructed records’.1 Of course, it is usually dangerous to assume that what is accessible online is all that exists about a given topic, or that it somehow represents the most important material available. In practice, digitization activities tend to be driven by a range of different imperatives, and these do not always coincide with the immediate interests of the researcher. Institutional drivers can include the availability of funding for specific projects such as new galleries, exhibitions and publications, or the sheer practicality of tackling one category of material rather than another. Such factors can have a significant impact on what is – or more importantly, what is not – made available in a digital format. The Victoria and Albert Museum is a complex institution with a huge range of objects, all of which are of potential interest to researchers and the general public. The V&A has also gone through many structural changes in the past 150 years or more, and this has had an inevitable impact on the arrangement of – and access to – the collections. The South Kensington Museum, as it soon became, was established after the Great Exhibition of 1851, and then evolved to become the modern V&A. The Word and Image Department was established in the early 2000s, when the National Art Library (NAL) merged with the Prints, Drawings and Paintings Department (PDP). The NAL holds around a million volumes, whereas PDP accounts for a similar number of prints, drawings, paintings, photographs and digital artworks. Word and Image is also responsible for the Archive of Art and Design (AAD) and the Museum’s own institutional archives. Using examples from the long nineteenth century, this paper attempts to explain how and why some objects in the Department’s collections are already fully documented online, while others might still lack digital images or detailed catalogue descriptions.